Dove’s #Realbeauty Pledge Partners with Mario Testino

Real women are having a real moment in fashion and beauty (finally). From major ad campaigns with brands like Urban Outfitters to real AF runways, the industry is finally starting to look like its customers. Dove has been on the real beauty train for years—you might even say they kicked off the empowering trend to putting regular women, not models, in advertisements way back in 2004—so it’s no surprise that their latest campaign delivers a diverse, empowering, and very real look at beauty.

As a brand, Dove practically wrote the book on putting real women—flaws and all—at the front and center of their ad campaigns. The latest campaign puts that idea into writing with a #Realbeauty pledge made up of three promises: To always feature real women, to nix all digital distortion, and to always focus on building body confidence and self-esteem.

The faces of the new campaign are accordingly real and diverse, including 32 women from over 15 countries, including Indonesia, Iran and Brazil, featured in a series of portraits shot by famed fashion photographer Mario Testino. In addition to the ethnic diversity, the #realbeauty pledge campaign is also super age-inclusive—the youngest is 11 and the oldest woman is 71.

“Usually when we make a campaign we’re making it for one market or a certain region and this one was a truly global campaign, so we had the whole world of beauty to pick from,” said Sophie Galvani, global vice president at Dove, in an interview with WWD. “It was really fun to look around and find just totally diverse beauty and also get the stories of these women as well because they’ve been truly inspirational.”

Along with each portrait, Dove asked each woman what beauty means to them and how they’ve overcome insecurities on their beauty journey. “I think the idea of beauty in all humans is in our minds at the moment, from politics to culture to human rights,” Testino told WWD. Considering the heightened fight for diversity playing out in the political arena, representing a diverse group of women in mainstream media is totally on point.